For the second year in a row, a student from San Juan County has been awarded the Washington Association of County Officials scholarship.

Rachel Wilbur, daughter of Lopez residents Shannon and Steven Wilbur, was one of five recipients state-wide of a $3,000 scholarship. Steven Wilbur, a chemist with Agilent Technologies, spoke in pleased tones about finding out his daughter had been awarded the prize on May 13.

Rachel Wilbur is currently in her junior year at Washington University studying Medical Anthropology, Global Health (MAGH) and Public Health.

Steven Wilbur commented that his daughter’s academic identity has blossomed in college, relating how she had originally enrolled in pre-med classes. “She was a student EMT for two years in high school and then got interested in medicine. But then she took a medical anthology class and changed her major.”

The scholarship was awarded on the merit of an application form and a personal essay. It is in this essay that Wilbur elaborates on her growing fascination with infectious disease, “especially tuberculosis, and the ways in which such diseases spread and affect societies.” Wilbur goes on to relate her successful research time in Ireland,where she researched the Irish tuberculosis epidemic of 1880-1950, and her upcoming summer field trip on the Indonesian Island of Tinjil. When there, she will learn sample collection and storage methods in the field.

Wilbur closed her report with a summery of her long term ambitions: “Ultimately, I plan to study the emergence and spread of tuberculosis through populations in order to better understand the specific elements of each society that make it vulnerable to the disease as a means of reducing the morbidity and mortality caused by tuberculosis throughout the developing world.”